Sports Stupidities

Moonbats Right and Left: Duke and Rutgers

April 2007: the world breathes a sigh of relief. The stories about Anna
Nicole's death and paternity of her baby were getting stale. Anyway, DNA will
settle paternity, whereas back in the good old days people could speculate
forever. If it kept up like this, soon there would be nothing in the news except
real issues, and who wants that?

Fortunately, radio shock jock Don Imus created a huge flap by using a racial
slur against the Rutgers women's basketball team. Then a few days later, the
rape charges against three Duke University lacrosse players were dropped after a
year of nonstop controversy.

I may be the only person left on the planet who has doubts about the Duke
case. Right from Day One, the right-wing fruit bats were all over the
case, calling it politically motivated persecution. Three white athletes accused
of assaulting a black exotic dancer at a party. Could it be a politically
motivated crusade by an corrupt, ambitious but inept DA playing the race card? Certainly.
Could the dismissal have been the result of a politically motivated full court
press by right wingers anxious to spring three privileged white kids on the
pretext "boys will be boys?" Just as certainly. Only four people know for sure.
The right wingers were constantly asking whether there would be the same kind of
prosecutorial zeal if the victim had been white and the alleged attackers black.
Fair question. Here's another fair question. Would the right wingers have been
as vociferous about innocence if the victim had been white and the alleged
attackers black?

Two undoubted acts of justice came out of this mess. First, the
coach was fired. Well, he resigned, but we all know the drill. Second, the Duke
team forfeited the rest of its season.

Why is this justice? Well, why do we have sports on college
campuses at all? There is no skill whatsoever in any sport that belongs in a
university curriculum. Basketball, football, and lacrosse are no more college
studies than hairdressing, typing, or auto body repair. There is nothing at all
wrong with any of those trades, but we teach them in tech schools, and sports
skills are tech school skills, not college skills.

The only reasons we have sports in colleges are, first, the money,
and second, the money, and somewhere down the list, some romantic notion that we are carrying on the heritage of the
ancient Greeks, by way of Baden-Powell and Cecil Rhodes, by pretending to meld
athleticism with intellectualism to create a well-balanced whole person. (Of
course, if any university really believed this, they'd take the football budget
spent on a handful of people and use it to let their student body spend a summer
hiking the Appalachian Trail, say.) Traditionally sports on campus have been
justified in terms of cultivating sportsmanship, teamwork, leadership, and a
spirit of excellence. So if we're going to use values to justify college sports,
let's insist that college sports deliver those values. The only justification
for a college sports program is that it demonstrates exemplary conduct.
Not just minimally acceptable ability to wear shoes and use the toilet, or non-criminal, but exemplary. Whatever happened at that
party, everyone knows that it was a drunken sex party. Many of the other
"innocent" players were there, as well (and created problems for their
teammates by stonewalling investigators, by the way). If sports are about values, you don't
host or tolerate drunken sex parties, turn a blind eye to substance abuse, get
criminal charges reduced, or hook your athletes up with hookers. Duke let it
happen, and Duke, unlike far too many other sports programs, paid the just
price.

I wouldn't have used the epithet Imus used. I will say that the
team he ridiculed will proudly graduate from Rutgers proficient in bouncing a
rubber ball. They will probably graduate with other skills as well, since it's
much less possible for female athletes to blow off college in the hopes of going
into pro sports. But any way you cut it, they're spending thousands of hours
honing skills that ultimately mean nothing. When you have to decide whether or
not you need to buy flood insurance for your house or whether that investment
opportunity is legitimate, how is being able to make a
three point shot going to help you?

The old fuddy-duddies in Chariots of Fire who disdained
Harold Abrahams for using a professional trainer had it right. Sports in
moderation as part of a well balanced life are healthy. Sports as the focus of
life are a perversion. Contrast the words of Harold Abrahams, who viewed sports
as his ticket to social approval, with the description of Eric Liddell, the
devout Christian who also happened to be a superb runner. Abrahams described a
race as "ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence." Wow. Lose and your
whole life is meaningless. On the other hand, one character said of Liddell,
"His speed is a mere extension of his life, its force."

The best thing to come out of the Imus mess is the number of
responsible black writers like Jason Whitlock who are speaking out about the far
worse language routinely used by black entertainers. In a piece in the Kansas
City Star on April 11, 2007, he wrote

[Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton] don’t have the heart to mount a
legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas. It is us. At this
time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a
culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison
culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is
anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing
and violent.

An Inconvenient Truth

Courtesy of Jack Shafer at Slate, May 23, 2007.

Al Gore and Thomas L. Friedman have co-discovered what ails our country.
It's national inattention to the most important issues.

Gore blamed the obsession with celebrity culture for the republic's poor
condition earlier this week on Good Morning America.

In condemning Britney-obsessed reporters and readers, Gore takes the easy
route. If he possessed any real courage in his conviction that news coverage
of the frivolous blocks the discussion of serious "issues," he'd attack
sports coverage. Sports capture a billion times the attention that
celebrities do and probably swallow 20 percent of the news budget of
dailies. The reason Gore gives sports coverage a bye while castigating
Britney coverage is simple: Sports fans talk back—loudly—and folks who crave
entertainment-news coverage are too embarrassed to defend their innocent
diversion.

"Running Up The Score"

This is my candidate for the most stupid expression in sports.

Some years ago, the Green Bay Packers lost to the Dallas Cowboys, and all 21
Dallas points were field goals, setting a new NFL record for field goals by a
kicker in a single game. Afterward, some of the Packers complained that Dallas
"ran up the score" to help their kicker get his record.

Guess what? If you're the offensive team, it is your job to run up the
score. And if you're the defense, it is your job to stop it from
happening. Granted, I wouldn't keep Brett Favre on the field to increase a 49-0
lead with five minutes to play (although after he became a parody of himself, I
would). But if the other team was caving in, I wouldn't
slow down, either. It was Green Bay's job to keep Dallas out of field goal
range, and they failed. Seven times.

If you are hopelessly behind and don't want to risk star players getting
hurt, put in second and third stringers. Or stand aside and let the other guys
score. Or leave the field and forfeit. But don't expect the winning team to
slack off in a chivalrous effort not to make you look as bad as you are.

Bad Calls

In the infamous 1972 Olympic basketball finals between the U.S. and the
Soviet Union, the U.S. team was ahead by one point when the final buzzer
sounded. They left the court, but the timekeeper ruled there were still a few
seconds on the clock. Play was resumed with the U.S. team hopelessly
disorganized and disoriented. The Soviets put the ball in play, scored, and won
the game, to the outrage of American fans.

I saw that game on TV. The U.S. team played like they were already counting
their endorsement money. They played like they were up against a junior college
team instead of a system that, for ideological reasons, took sports with deadly
seriousness.

In the first America's Cup race, Queen Victoria was watching at the finish
line when, to everyone's dismay, the America came into view. She asked
one of her aides who was second, and he answered "There is no second." It is any team's job to blow the opposition so far out of the game that no
imaginable bad luck can affect the outcome. If the 1972 U.S. team had played like U.S.
basketball teams traditionally had played, they'd have been ahead by so much
they could have been showering in the locker room when the Soviets went back on the court
and still won.

To this day, the 1972 team has refused to collect its silver medals. So they
have what they deserve. Nothing.

"He Cost Us the Series"

In the eighth inning of game six of the 2003 National League Championship
Series, the Chicago Cubs were leading the Florida Marlins 3-0. A foul ball that
would have been an easy out was deflected into the stands by a fan. The Marlins
scored eight runs that inning, won the game, then went on to win the deciding
seventh game, depriving the Cubs of the chance to go to the World Series for the
first time in 58 years. The fan, of course, has been vilified far and wide for
costing the Cubs the series. A Cubs fan bought the baseball and ceremonially
destroyed it.

Say what?

The Cubs were leading 3-0. All they had to do was maintain that
lead.

It was a foul ball. The pitcher still had a chance to get the
batter out.

With eight runs scored in the inning, the Cubs had at least eight
chances to get the remaining outs they needed.

They had a whole inning left to catch up even if they did let the
Marlins score eight runs.

They had a whole game the next day to recover and clinch a trip to
the series.

This isn't a long fly ball in the ninth inning that could be the winning out,
but scores the winning run when a fan snatches it from the outfielder. This is a
team that blew a solid lead and went into total meltdown, wasted a long chain of
opportunities to correct, and blamed the failure
on an incident that had absolutely no bearing on the game. If the popup had a
hair more forward velocity and went into the stands of its own accord, what
would the Cubs and their fans offer as an excuse?

Dignity in the Olympics

When two U.S. runners finished 1-2 in an Athens 2004 race and grinned to each
other at the finish line, with one possibly yielding to the other, commentators
went ballistic. "This is the Olympics," they screamed. "Show some respect."

This is a joke, right? Olympic judges make drug dealers, hookers and kiddie
porn producers look respectable in comparison, and in 2004 they set a mark for
bias and incompetence remarkable even for them. And two runners who mug to each
other at the finish line are going to tarnish the Olympics?

Poor Ron Artest

The incident where basketball player Ron Artest went into the stands after a
boorish fan and was suspended for the rest of the season would normally be a
simple case of poetic justice. A jerk of a fan gets punched out and an overpaid
hooligan gets suspended. Not worth putting on this page.

The actual Sports Stupidity is a November 28, 2004 commentary written by
Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post. She points out that Artest may get
over $5 million a year, but the Feds take
39 per cent of that, the state another 8, and his agent and manager 10 to 15
each. We won't dwell on the fact that the agent and manager are deductible
business expenses, and if the agent and manager aren't finding ways to shelter
the rest they're not doing their jobs. That leaves Artest with maybe 30 per cent
of his gross income, or $1.5 million. Then there's his CD.

Artest supports not only his immediate family, but six siblings and 13
cousins, whom he is putting through private school. He's supporting perhaps 25
people. Give him his due. Lots of people with more money (watch any episode of
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous) aren't doing as much. $1.5 million
divided by 25 is $60,000. He's supporting 25 family members on a paltry $60,000
per year. Each. After taxes. Everyone who has tried to support an
entire family
on less than $60,000 a year, before taxes, break out your violins.

Why do I get the distinct impression Jenkins wouldn't care nearly so much about
the tax bite if this were the owner of a business that merely employed two or three
hundred people? Why do I suspect that she wouldn't sympathize with the financial
burdens of suburbanites trying to put their kids through private schools?

But the real victims are the people Artest is trying to "help." He sends
talented kids to basketball camp, where some of them go on to athletic
scholarships and maybe even the pros. Let's assume Artest does all the
responsible things: he pounds away on the long odds against a pro career,
insists his kids keep up their studies and stresses the importance of getting a
sound college degree so his protégées will have something to fall back on in
case they don't make the pros, or an injury cuts their career short. That still
leaves tens of thousands of inner city kids who spend their most productive
years practicing a fundamentally useless activity.

Because face it; Artest's skills, stripping away the hype, amount to bouncing
a rubber ball. He can bounce it in ways that most people cannot, but his skills
have absolutely no application to anything else. Inner city kids who waste their
school years on the basketball court, and who sneer at academics because they
dream of making it big in the pros, are the losers.

One Writer Gets It

That would be Mark Hasiuk of the Vancouver Courier, whose article
"NBA: a ghetto gutter run by money grubbers" was published on Friday, December
19, 2008.

The NBA is America at its worst.

The once proud league, which peaked 20 years ago during the
Bird/Magic/Jordan era, has morphed into a reality TV show, where money and image
trump teamwork and athletic achievement. Players like Allen Iverson--perhaps the
greatest basketball talent of his generation--spend more energy producing
sneaker commercials than winning basketball games. NBA players wear saggy
shorts, roll in posses and cuss on camera. Television ratings have dropped
steadily since 1996. Basketball icons such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the late
Red Auerbach have denounced today's players, calling them "thugs" and "bums."
How'd this happen? Who's to blame?

Basketball traditionalists (older white guys) blame the
overwhelming influence of hip hop culture in the NBA. But they're wrong. Hip
hop, a cultural movement spawned in 1970s New York, has been dead for years. It
sold its soul to corporate sleaze merchants, who repackage black music for a
white suburban consumer base.

Nope, the remnants of hip hop--flamboyant chauvinism,
jailhouse lingo, black ink tattoos--didn't kill the NBA. It was New York lawyers
like [NBA commissioner] Stern, who cashed in on the athletic ability of young
black men while ignoring the social realities of basketball in America.

According to a New York Times report, more than 70 per cent of
black American children are born out of wedlock. Most NBA players hail from poor
neighbourhoods--and despite token college careers--graduate from broken public
school systems. They are often ill-equipped to handle multi-million-dollar
contracts, or the expectations of a community desperate for positive male role
models. To be fair, the NBA, like other professional sports leagues, is a
business. And it's not responsible for the endemic problems of black America.
But considering basketball's influence on black popular culture, the NBA has a
responsibility to produce a "positive" product, not the ghetto garbage we see
today.

Just By Way of Additional Evidence

I give you "Athletes With Illegitimate Kids: Expanded And Updated 2009
Edition" at FanIQ, January 5, 2008. While there are representatives from all
sports, two in particular predominate. Suffice it to say that the phrase
"bouncing baby" is appropriate.

The Second Stupidest Rule in Sports

In both cases, a player is penalized for making a move that misleads the
opposing player. Before the false start rule, players would routinely try to
draw opposing players into an offside penalty. If you did cross the line of
scrimmage, there was no penalty as long as you didn't touch an opposing player
and got back into position before the ball was snapped. The idea was to have
enough discipline and concentration to stay put until the ball was actually
snapped. Of course, players back then could be expected to be more disciplined
because they were paid so much more. Right?

The Really Stupidest Rule in Sports

Actually, something does beat the false start and balk for stupidity. Those,
after all, are occasional infractions, and you can go an entire game without
committing a foul. One sport built its whole essence around a stupid
rule.

It has to be dribbling in basketball. What other sport imposes an artificial
burden on players because the sport would otherwise be trivial?

Adding to the ridiculousness is that players practically have to carry
the ball to the airport and fly to another city to be called for
"traveling." If they're good ticket draws, that is.

Let's make the Tour de France riders ride tricycles. With flat tires. In the
snow. No, let's make the
Boston Marathon runners hop on one foot. How about we make Olympic swimmers tie
a bowling ball to their ankle? Grease the horizontal bar in gymnastics? Play the U.S. Open in a gravel pit? Replace
baseballs with golf balls or marbles?

Every other sport allows players to do everything possible to maximize their
performance. Often to absurd lengths. Tight clothes and graphite bike frames,
carbing up and drinking power drinks while running, playing golf on carefully
manicured surfaces. If you're really all that good, why shouldn't you be able to
use a Wal-Mart bike and street clothes for racing or be able to play golf in a
gravel pit?

But only basketball imposes a totally artificial impediment for the sole
purpose of making the sport more difficult. Because otherwise it's indoor rugby.

Needs and Wants

Every year around Thanksgiving we hear it: "We need a college football
playoff system." Need. Those of us who speak English as our first
language find this a novel use of the word "need." We're used to thinking of
"need" as meaning "to feel an acute lack of something vital or essential," as
in:

We need to find a cure for AIDS

We need to find an alternative to petroleum as an energy source

We need to run a DNA sample to get an innocent person off Death Row

We need to raise $18,000 so's li'l April May June kin git all her
internal organs replaced.

Putting a college football playoff system on the same plane as any of those
needs is just plain sick. Can there possibly be a more useless piece of
information than which college team is the best? None of the teams will have the
same players next year; none of the teams will have any of their current
players four years from now. And if we could somehow figure out which team is
best in September, they may not be by November.

Without looking in a reference, tell me which college team was Number One in,
oh, 1984. Then tell me any practical application of that information. You
think college courses like Etruscan Poetry or Taxonomy of Bats are useless?
They're practicality itself compared to knowing which college team is Number
One. What person with the tiniest semblance of a life cares about which
college team is Number One?

But if you absolutely must have one, here it is. Double elimination.
One loss is a bad day. Two losses and your season is over. Best of all, we could
do this concurrently with the current system, and apply it to any past season.
Games against already eliminated teams don't count for anything, except if you
lose. Last team standing with
less than two losses is number one - in the event of a tie, total games won and
total winning margin against eligible teams is the tiebreaker. Here's an
even better suggestion: if no team finishes with less than two losses, there
is no Number One team that year. If we can have years when Nobel and
Pulitzer Prizes aren't awarded, what's so special about football?

The Greatest Moment in Sports History

November 17, 1968. The Oakland Raiders and New York Jets
fought a seesaw battle all afternoon, and with 65 seconds left to go, NBC cut
away from the game to the movie Heidi. In that time, Oakland scored two
touchdowns to win the game. Needless to say, football fans were furious.

Ironically, the network had already decided to delay the start of Heidi, but
the flood of calls from football fans wondering if the game would be allowed to
finish, and the flood from Heidi fans wondering if their show would start
on time, totally locked up the phone system and prevented the word getting to
the technician in charge. (The network explained that the technician did the right thing; the sponsor for
Heidi had bought the time and if the technician had decided on his own to
wait for the end of the game, he would have lost his job.)

On behalf of everyone who has ever had a favorite program delayed or
pre-empted by a sporting event, I call this the greatest moment of poetic
justice in history. For once, sports fans found out what it feels like.

Of course, they never will again. After this incident the networks decided
they would never again cut a game short. So all you have to do now when you tune
in to a delayed program is try to figure out how much the delay is.

Or will they? On June 13, 2004, three golfers at the 2004 Buick Classic
were in their second sudden-death overtime hole when the networks cut away to
America's Funniest Home Videos. Ya gotta love it, a golf tournament being
pre-empted by one of the few things to rival it for inanity.

And Now For Something Intelligent

Christopher Hitchens, well known militant atheist, may or may not be right
about God, but he's dead on about a false God. Writing in Newsweek (February 5,
2010) he notes that other nations have complained that Canada has not permitted
any athletes but its own to practice on the Olympic ski slopes. American Ron
Rossi complained "I think it shows a lack of sportsmanship." Hitchens comments:

On the contrary, Mr. Rossi, what we are seeing is the very essence of
sportsmanship. Whether it's the exacerbation of national rivalries that you
want ”as in Africa this year” or the exhibition of the most depressing traits of
the human personality (guns in locker rooms, golf clubs wielded in the home,
dogs maimed and tortured at stars' homes to make them fight, dope and steroids
everywhere), you need only look to the wide world of sports for the most rank
and vivid examples.

Moving on, he observes:

Noticed how the sign of a bad high school getting toward its Columbine moment is that the jocks are in the saddle?

Lance Armstrong and Cheating

Lance Armstrong has been stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for
using performance-enhancing substances. His titles will be given to the highest
cyclist who was clean. That will probably end up being some French grandmother
who was cycling home from the grocery store when the pack went by.

There are several reasons I despise cycling as a sport. Foremost is that
the cycling organizations refuse to allow anything but Victorian-era designs
to compete and thereby impede the development of really efficient and
ergonomic bicycle designs. We need alternatives to automobiles and
pretending it's still 1890 doesn't help.

Then there's just plain arrogance. An Australian driver, frustrated at
Beijing-bound cyclists hogging the road, passed them, then slammed on his
brakes, causing a fair amount of damage. If I'd been President, I'd have
ordered the embassy to identify every American involved, yank their
passports and send them home. No Olympics for you. Traffic laws stipulate
that cyclists ride single file. Even if you're training for the Olympics. If
you really must ride flat out, I bet there are some empty roads around Alice
Springs that will do nicely.

But steroids are inconsequential. Rampant cheating in cycling began when
cyclists wore anything but street clothes, rode anything but unaltered
production bikes and trained by doing anything but cycling to and from their
real, non-cycling jobs. The old codgers in Chariots of Fire who
criticized Harold Abrahamson for hiring a personal trainer recognized a deep
truth. It wasn't just unseemly, it was cheating.